Tag: niche

Project To Completely Finish Super Mario Maker 1 Enters Home Stretch

Super Mario Maker. Not the one for Switch, with the Master Sword power up and Superball Flower and the like. The one for WiiU, with all the Amibo characters and that formerly had the website listing all the levels, that Nintendo took down because it is a company of good and bad, and for them software preservation is among the worst.

Super Mario Maker survives, for now, but its online services will be shut down in April, removing the vast swath of levels that players made for the software, because Nintendo can’t be assèd to preserve it. That sucks epically, gigantically, humongously, brobdingnagianly. But it’s Nintendo. They always do what they want, heedless of the opinion of others, and as I said, that’s both good and bad.

Remember Super Mario Maker? Most players used it to construct hyper-lethal deathtraps, literal abattoirs of Marios. (Tip: don’t Google image search the word “abattoir.”) Sure, I tried constructing reasonable levels of fair situations, but saying that online is like claiming I don’t watch television: it sounds pretentious. In practice everyone made at least one Smiling Hellscape, and yes I did make at least a couple.

But on the other hand there is speedrun culture, who attempts to overcome any challenge in a game no matter how ridiculous. In order to upload your level to the SMM servers, you have to complete it. That means it must be completable, even if it’s ludicrously unfair. In addition to the usual kaizo gauntlets, some players created levels that rely on prior knowledge to finish, and tackling one of those if you don’t have that information can be Promethean exercise in trial and error, emphasis on the trial.

That brings us to the Discord server of Team 0% (invite link). There mission: to show every level created for Super Mario Maker some love, and by love I mean, at least one completion, before the servers go dark for bad in a month’s time. SMM helps out by offering to give players uncompleted levels. And so they play on, no challenge to great, no gimmick too obscure. Recently they finished every level made in the year 2019. And they’re down to their last 1,000 levels overall!

One month to go. 1,000 levels to finish. Can they do it? They finished 1,000 levels back in the first week of their project, so it’s definitely possible. We’re watching them on their epic quest, and wish them luck. The good kind!

7DRL 2024 Coming Up Soon

I never finished my recap of 2023’s highest-ranked 7DRL entries, and 2024 is rolling around already, set to begin on March 1st! Here is it’s itch.io page, and Cogmind creator Kyzrati’s Mastodon mention.

7DRL, the 7-Day RogueLike challenge, is one of the oldest still-going gamejams out there, and still among the most interesting. Every year a number of surprisingly interesting games come out of it. One year, back when @Play was on GameSetWatch, I took it upon myself to look at every game that succeeded at the challenge that year. I think it was 2011? Even though it took weeks, enough time that I vowed I’d never review every game again, even some of the lesser ones had some interesting aspect to them.

This year will undoubtedly add yet more game to that backlog, hooray! That was a sarcastic hooray, I won’t deny it. But it was also, in a sense, an honest one too. More interesting and unique games mean more fun for everyone, fun that doesn’t cost $60 + DLC prices. And making them means more experienced gamedevs making things they like, things that don’t rely on multi-hundred dollar triple-A outlays of cash to realize, and that helps us, very slightly yet perceptibly, reclaim gaming culture from the wash of monotonous big-money content with which we’re all inundated.

It all starts March 2nd, so if you’re interested in participating, get ready to make! And it all ends, mostly, on March 11th, so get ready to play! (I say mostly because technically the challenge isn’t absolutely time-locked. But it’s a good period to aim for and build hype around.)

Super Mario Sunshine’s Substitution Cipher

Are you surprised by that title? It isn’t obvious that there even is one, but Youtuber 2CPhoenix makes a strong case that there is, that’s (mostly) consistent across the game’s signage! Here’s their video on it (9 1/2 minutes):

These kinds of ciphers aren’t to common in games, but they’re not unheard-of either. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker uses one for the Hylian language, which it even translates for you if you play through the game a second time, and there’s at least one other such language that’s used in Breath of the Wild for Shiekah artifacts. And of course, working out a cipher that’s used in many locations is a major late-game puzzle in Fez.

The “language” of what are possibly the Noki in Sunshine Mario Sunshine is one of those things where, like Bubble Bobble’s Bubble Alphabet, the letters are actually heavily stylized versions of our familiar Latin alphabet, meaning, if you kind of take your brain off the hook slightly and just try to read the glyphs like they were words, you can get a bit of a sense of what they’re saying. Or at least I can. A little.

It’s enough to make one want to take a second look at the fakey-letters in some other Nintendo games, such as the Splatoon and Pokemon series….

An Ad From Compute Magazine #001

This is an ad, on the first page of the first issue of Compute Magazine, for “the pet program” from “softside software,” names all in lowercase. I have no idea if any copies of these programs remains in existence in our universe, but two places to look would be zimmers.net’s FTP archive and the Silicon PET Archive, and even in this era of the internet there are a fair number of PET software archives remaining.

Softside was far from the only company to put out its hopeful shingle through the pages of early computer magazines. At the time, magazine publishing worked with a lead time of several months. It is possible that Softside Software had gone under even by the time this ad saw print, but then again maybe not. A forum thread on AtariAge mentions several BASIC games sold by a “SoftSide,” apparently an Atari 8-bit magazine-on-disk, but they were based in New Hampshire, and the Softside of the ad was in New York.

Notes on the programs proffered:

  1. Graphics Pac 2: I’m not sure what they mean, as the reference I’ve found claims the PET didn’t have a bitmapped display, but there were several models, and further add-on cards that added bitmapped displays, an 80-column mode, and even (gasp) color. A simple “Microsette” itself would not be enough. We are near the end of the PET’s reign as Commdore’s core product though.
  2. Assembler 2001: It is easy to laugh this off nowadays when assemblers are mostly free software (and thank frog for that), but this was before that, and before the internet. $16 is a great price for an assembler from that time.
  3. Bike. Apparently it was a Hammurabi/Lemonade Stand style game, where you made business decisions through simple menus and entering figures. Maybe someday someone will write such a game about running Commodore. You might scoff at the warning that “Bike is dangerously addictive,” but standards were lower then. It was 1979; Wizardry wouldn’t be published until 1981. “Worth a million in fun, we’ll offer Bike at $9.95.” I admire their chutzpah.
  4. Pinball. “Dynamic usage of the PET’s graphics features” would have meant using its hardcoded, unchangable ROM graphics character set, with no sprites. “With sound!” That would mean its simple piezoelectric speaker. Don’t expect Raul Julia’s voice, or even Gorgar’s, to talk to you from the machine.
  5. Super Doodle. Certainly of no relation to Omni Software’s popular Commodore paint program. Super Doodle lets you use any number of colors so long as they’re black or green, and a resolution of 40×25 characters. “Why waste any more paper.” Well probably because loading your notes off of tape would take too long.
  6. Driving Ace. Offers two games for $9.95. The description doesn’t give a good sense of what they were like, but there are essentially only three kinds of racing game: scrolling in one direction (Monaco GP style), one screen or scrolling all around (Sprint style), and 3D (Pole Position through to Ridge Racer to F-Zero). I presume one of these is like Sprint and the other is like Monaco GP; I don’t think the PET was capable of even a slight approximation of 3D, but then, Pole Position’s hardware shouldn’t have been capable of what it could do either.

The ad is from Compute Magazine, most often stylized as COMPUTE! with an exclamation point, grew out of The PET Gazette in 1979. That former publication centered around the computing devices from Commodore International’s subsidiary, Commodore Business Machines. CBM had been around for over two decades up to that point as a maker of typewriters, adding machines and calculators, but in a maverick move by its co-founder and president Jack Tramiel, they bought MOS Technologies, which had just startled the nascent computing world by creating an ultra low cost microprocessor, the 6502. Tramiel had learned from a bit of a bastard move by Texas Instruments, who used their ownership of much of their supply chain to release a line of calculators that sold for less than Commodore’s production costs. Now, Tramiel owned the company that produced the chip that would soon launch the personal computing revolution, and could make other chips too, and Commodore was set to soon pull off Texas Instruments’ trick on the home computer industry with the VIC-20 and Commodore 64.

But until then they made other computers. They made the KIM-1 “single board computer,” and the PET 2001 and other machines with the PET branding. The PET Gazette’s audience was originally those machines, but burgeoning success convinced them to publish a more generalized 6502-focused magazine, and that magazine was Compute.

I have more to come on Compute, which in many ways was the archetypal type-in program magazine. It was far from the only one; other magazines offering type-in software at the time, names now even more obscure than Compute’s, were Creative Computing, Family Computing, and Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power Play. Compute would for a while languish somewhat in the shadow of its own sister publication, borrowing part of its name from its predecessor, Compute’s Gazette, which focused on Commodore’s computers, the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and later the Commodore 128.

The PET Gazette was founded by Small System Services Inc., and was published out of a shop, the Corner Computer Store, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Presumably that changed as the subscription rolls increased. Eventually Compute would be sold to ABC Publishing, a subsidiary of the broadcast network, and it would continue happily for several years. When its fortunes began to wane it was sold, first to Penthouse Publishing (really!), where its logo was redone to resemble that of its own publication Omni, then later to Ziff-Davis, who only wanted its subscriber list anyway; I don’t think they ever published an issue. As it became clearer that the future would be MS-DOS and Mac, its focus shifted, but they kept up their small systems focus for surprisingly long. I don’t think the Penthouse era provided any coverage that wasn’t DOS, Windows or Mac, but it would take time to check. Corrections later, if necessary.

Technology Connections Examines Pinball Machines

Back in October, and again last month, the popular Youtube channel Technology Connections, which in the past has explicated the workings of the popcorn button on microwave ovens, an 80s home TV censorship device, and the marvels of heat pumps, among many other topics. The channel is great, a primary example of how to do Youtube explainer videos right. But, we’re mostly about games here, and they don’t often cover those. Until he recently did some videos on old pinball machines!

October 2023: How the 70s-era “Aztec” Pinball Machine Works (50 minutes)

December 2023: The Step-by-step Logic of Old Pinball Machines (43 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Stop-Motion Promo for Metal Slug Awakening

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I’ve always been a little ambivalent about Metal Slug. Not about its gameplay, which is excellent, but about its theme. It’s been said that it is impossible to depict warfare without glorifying it in some way. I think there is some truth to that, and there is no question that the Metal Slug games depict the hell out of it.

I think the Metal Slug makers recognize a bit of that, because of how humanely the enemy soldiers are depicted. They’re all trying to kill you, but they’re far from snarling villains. When not actively trying to bring about the end of Marco and Tarma (and Fio and Eri)’s lives, they’re chatting with each other, having a meal, sunning themselves on the deck of a ship, using the toilet or just hanging out. When they spot the invading players, they often react in terror. Sometimes you don’t want to shoot them, even when they’re climbing on your Slug and trying to throw a grenade in the hatch. Even their leader, General Morden, is not the typical villain. His backstory says that dissatisfaction with corruption in the Regular Army’s ranks, along with the loss of his wife and daughter due to an act of terrorism, was what caused him to launch his rebellion, and his solders admire his leadership.

It’s almost enough to make one want to overlook the questionable aspects of his army’s symbology, for which I can only thank my lucky frog the usual suspects haven’t latched onto. Morden is rehabilitated a bit in the endings of Metal Slugs 2 and 3, where he’s betrayed by the Martians he joined forces with, and helps the player’s commandos defeat, but its true that he’s always the antagonist at the start of each later game. Metal Slug, for all its sci-fi, zombie, magic and other trappings, is still a game about depicting conventional warfare, no matter how one-sided and improbable it may be.

Ah, as is often my habit, I used the subject of the post to write a short essay on some aspect of gaming. I hope you don’t mind. Here is the video, a stop-motion recreation of a typical Metal Slug scene, made by official entities to promote a mobile game. It seems appropriate to the subject.

Metal Slug: Awakening | Full Stop Motion Video (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

Sublime Games: Stephen’s Sausage Roll

Stephen’s Sausage Roll (homepage, Steam $30, Humble $30 – Increpare gets the most money if you buy it here, plus you get a Steam key)

This is the beginning of a series of reviews of sublime games. The sublime is, as described on Wikipedia, the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. That’s a lot to live up to for a videogaem!

I’m using that term to describe games that feel like they stretch out your brain just by playing them. Usually this doesn’t mean by difficulty, although Stephen’s Sausage Roll has plenty of that, but by there being some special aspect of it. I think what I mean by that will become more evident as this series continues, but Stephen’s Sausage Roll is rather foundational. Both Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) and Arvi Teikari (Baba Is You) have claimed it as inspirational. Sublime things tend to inspire people a lot.

It’s easy to miss the quality of Stephen’s Sausage Roll if you play it casually, because it’s not a game that really lends itself to casual play. SSR doesn’t ease you into its puzzles, right from the very start the game demands thorough knowledge of the consequences of its movement scheme, knowledge that can only come from failing at its puzzles many times. Stephen’s movement is reminiscent of the porter from Sokoban, but he’s got this dang fork sticking out of him, and every movement must take it into account. Steven can only move forward and backward without turning to the side, which rotates the fork around him.

Understanding how to move that fork around is essential to shoving around the sausages in each level. To solve a level, all of its two-tile-long sausages must be moved over grills exactly once in four locations: once on each tile of one side, and once on each tile of the other. Leaving a sausage on a space doesn’t overcook it, but you can’t move it so a cooked spot touches a grill again. One move for each sausage on each tile of each side! Burning a sausage, or dumping one in the water, immediately fails the level.

This playthrough of one early level demonstrates how it works:

This description is not all of Stephen’s Sausage Roll’s tricks, not by a metric mile, but it’ll stump most players for a good while. It starts out hard and gets harder.

There are no tutorials, not even instructions other than an early sign that tells to use the arrow keys to move, Z to Undo, and R to Restart a puzzle. (These hotkeys have become a bit traditional, and work in other games.) You can’t even read the sign until you realize you have to swing your fork around and walk alongside it. Stephen does have other moves, I have come to learn from reading pages about the game, but it’s impossible to activate them in early levels.

When I read writing about puzzle games, the writer often talks about how smart the game made them feel, sometimes in a paragraph that also mentions dopamine hits, like they were Skinner boxes that give players treats. I dislike game criticism that tries to reduce them to pop neurochemistry. Besides, these days dopamine is not in short supply. It’s available on every Steam corner, plus you could get it just as well from food, an interesting novel, a movie, or pornography for that matter. Difficult puzzle games make you work for it, and where is the fun in that?

The fact is, puzzle games are not interesting for being a dopamine administration mechanism. They are about improvement, about learning to overcome challenges on your own. Once you learn how to do Sokoban puzzles they lose their appeal, because solving puzzles isn’t as much fun as learning to solve them.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll does not make the player feel smart. It makes them feel perfectly stupid at first, but by the end of it they may feel smart. They may, because by completing it they may have become a little smarter. The improving aspects of playing video games is not often mentioned these days, but it is one of the main reasons that I enjoy them. Thinking through a difficult puzzle can help one learn to think a little better, and because of that these sausages are no mere empty calories.

But the difficulty, and the novel take on Sokoban rules, aren’t the only reasons I’m writing about this in a series about sublime games. Each of the game’s little puzzles is a small portion of a larger world. When you enter a level, most of the world sinks beneath the sea, leaving you with a tiny portion of it remaining. When you properly cook all of that level’s sausages, the world returns, but pink walls, where the sausages were, will be gone, allowing you progress. This means the very terrain of the overworld is made of the puzzles you’re solving, which is an unexpected elegance in a game about cooking sausages. And mirroring that fact, there is a deeper meaning to the sausages you’re cooking and eliminating from the world, one that is revealed slowly, as you solve each excruciating puzzle.

SSR is a game that makes a mockery of the very concept of review scores, as most sublime games do. The graphics are purposely done in a PS1 style, intentionally ugly by current standards, and the sounds are simple steps, swishes, and the occasional “ugh” that may have come from the game or the player. And it’s gameplay, while great, shows that play can be about subtracting, taking away all extraneous elements, rather than adding unnecessary new things. In what world does taking away things add points to a review score?

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is not an extremely popular game. While it inspired big hits like The Witness and Baba Is You, and is rated Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, it hasn’t sold as well. But it hangs on, quietly enlightening new generations of players and designers. It may inspire you too, if you were to let it.

The End of Blaseball Blexplained

It has now been over seven months since the end of Blaseball, that shining star of lockdown that burned brightly but ended suddenly. Stories will be told of its brief reign, and memories zealously hoarded. I’m amazed that no one else has definitively moved in to take its place with their own take on splorts, it seems to be an opportunity waiting to be filled, but until such time as it happens, the concept, along with the game itself, continues to Rest in Violence.

The planets orbiting Blaseball’s many suns continue to orbit, their surfaces unwarmed but still hosting faint signs of life. The Blaseball Wiki remains online, explaining the absurdly twisty intricacies of a game that no longer exists, and The Society for Internet Blaseball Research still hosts statistics and information related to that dearly missed pastime.

One of those planets is Blaseball Blexplained, a Youtube series that doggedly and diligently presented season recaps of Blaseball’s many crazy seasons. Since Blaseball’s ending, they’ve slowly continued their recaps, and have now finally finished their last Expansion Era summary, of the Hellmouth Sunbeams. It is around 16 minutes long. It present the final recantation of the nearly un-understandable events that marked the final seasons as did all the others, throwing out references to Black Holes, Feedback and Fax Machines, counting on you to know what the hell all those things mean. You do, don’t you? ‘Course you do.

So, one last broadcast from Blaseball Explained, favorite fake sport summary channel, now broadcasting exclusively to the Hall of Flame.

Farewell, Blaseball. In your memory, I proclaim: hail Namerifeht.

The Monitor, friendly guardian of the Hall of Flame and concessions operations
(Image from blaseball.com)

P.S. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (SIBR) has a page of information on how the fates of Blaseball, early on, intersected with that of the Pacific Salmon Treaty of 1985, and of a mysterious face named by fans Salmon Steve. Here is that page.

Dark Arts of Pinball: Deathsaves

So we covered bang backs back on Saturday. Let’s look at another tournament-illegal pinball maneuver, the deathsave. Here’s video from PAPA showing a couple being successfully performed (1 minute):

It’s another trick that involves the machine being bumped forcefully from the front in a specific way, this time to save balls going down the right outlane. I’ve never done one myself (even if I could muster the force, I don’t really want to). There are tables, including Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Last Action Hero, that are even set up to recognize when they’ve happened and reward it, or at least inform the player: I saw what you did there.

It prioritizes players with sufficient strength to shove the machine hard enough, and risks damaging it, so it’s illegal in tournament play. Due to the nature of tilt sensors, which are typically plum bobs with a conductive ring around them, depending on the details of the table it need not even incur a tilt warning, although it could run afoul of the slam tilt sensor, a separate device. Tilt sensors exist to allow some nudging but punish excessive use, and tilting results in the loss of a ball and any bonus. Slam tilt sensors are designed to protect the hardware itself, and immediately end the current game, which forfeits even the chance to enter initials. Essentially it resets the game’s computer. So, be careful with that.

Dark Arts of Pinball: Bang Backs

An unalterable law of pinball is, when the ball slips between the flippers, or goes down an outlane, it is lost, too bad so sad, cue the bonus count, unless you tilted when you tried to save it, that is.

But this is not actually true.

There are a small number of what we might call “dark arts” in pinball, techniques to save balls that otherwise would not be saveable. This is one of the things that’s interesting about pinball. It’s not like video games where everything that happens is the result of processors moving bits around. There is room for things to happen on a pinball table that the game software has no control over.

One might even make a case, if they were feeling argumentative, that the scoring and the rules have an at-best incidental influence over the real game, which takes place purely in the physical realm. This isn’t completely true: the software awards extra balls, controls playfield toys, enforces tilts, and otherwise manipulates the game’s Newtonian world, but it is true that, if the machine is in working order, and the player never misses their shots, that they can play indefinitely, and even score popcorn points for hitting low-value targets. Pull that off long enough and you can earn arbitrarily high scores, but I hope you’re good enough to hit the same shot over and over thousands of times, though, not to mention have the spare time to do it in.

A consequence of this is, lost balls can be rescued, in a number of ways. One of them is the bang back.

When the ball goes down the left outlane, along the side and bottom of the playfield, if the left flipper is raised and the right flipper left down, a sudden forceful blow by the player’s hand against the lockdown bar at the right spot can impart enough force to the ball to cause it to leap up onto the right flipper, and back into play. Even though the machine “knows” the ball went down the outlane, due to triggering its switch, it generally won’t penalize the player for doing this. The ball-ending event is it coming to rest in the trough, the receptacle for out-of-play pinballs beneath the playfield. Until the ball reaches it, it’s live.

Bang backs are a dark art because they enable extra-long turns, and also the force required to execute them risks damaging both the machine and the player’s hand, and so are illegal in tournament play. But they can be pulled off pretty consistently, as this video from the PAPApinball channel (1 minute) demonstrates:

Another dark art of pinball is the deathsave, but let’s save that for later….

AGDQ Starts Tomorrow!

AGDQ, one of GDQ’s two yearly life speedrunning events, begins tomorrow and runs to the 24th! Here’s the schedule!

Here are some highlights, according to me. The times I give are US Eastern/Pacific, but the schedule page linked above can convert times to your own zone:

Sunday, January 14th

Noon/9 AM: Tunic – Everyone’s favorite fox-based Zelda-like.

12:40 PM/9:40 AM: Super Monkey Ball – Monkey Ball speedruns are always awesome to watch!

3:40 PM/12:40 AM: Tales’ Adventure – A glitchless run of a Game Gear game, and one of the less remarked-upon of the Sonic series.

4:49 PM/1:49 PM: Donkey Kong 64 – An infamous 3D platformer experienced the best possible way: watching someone else play it.

8:55 PM/5:55 PM: Ultimate Doom – One of several billion speedruns of Doom, I’d expect this to be heavily optimized.

9:43 PM/6:43 PM: Jet Set Radio Future – The underrated Xbox sequel to the Dreamcast original.

Monday, January 15th

3:13 AM/12:13 AM: The Typing of the Dead – Worth checking in for the funny word list!

5:13 AM/2:13 AM: Marble Madness II race – At last, over 30 years after the prototype sequel to Marble Madness was scrapped, it finally comes to GDQ. Mere days after the game was leaked to the public there were already extremely proficient runs of MM2 on Youtube, so don’t blink or it’ll be over before you open your eyes.

10:01 AM/7:01 AM: Manifold Garden, reverse tree order – This game is amazing.

11:38 AM/8:38 AM: 30XX – sequel to 20XX, a procedurally-generated platformer.

2:37 PM/11:37 AM: Metroid Prime 2: Echoes – A competent sequel to the original Metroid Prime that tends to be overshadowed by the original. This is a 100% run, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

7:30 PM/4:30 PM: Sonic Adventure 2 Battle – Another underrated game, this run seeks to get all A ranks.

10:55 PM/7:55 PM: Pikmin 4 – The Pikmin games seem to alternate, with the odd-numbered games having strong time limits, and the even-numbered ones being a lot more laid back. They’re all terrific though, and provide a kind of gameplay that few other games attempt.

Tuesday, January 16th

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Arkanoid – I presume this is the NES version. Coming from the lineage of Breakout, this game is extremely hard. I hope they’re playing it on NES hardware, with the official paddle controller made for this game.

9:23 AM/6:23 AM: Gimmick! – The new schedule page doesn’t specify which platform the game is being played on, unfortunately. This could either be the NES prototype original or the official (and ludicrously expensive) exA-Arcadia remake.

11:34 AM/8 34 AM: The Legend of Zelda – This run is glitchless, which is an important consideration for Zelda 1 these days.

2:03 PM/11:03 AM: Gyromite (Game B, Dog Assistance) – 🐕🐕🐕？？？

8:00 PM/5:00 PM: Octopath Traveller II – Might be a good opportunity to see what this game is about, if you haven’t jumped at it yet?

10:52 PM/7:52 PM: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – IGA’s post-Konami Metroidvania, with an emphasis on the Vania.

Wednesday, January 17th

2:59 AM/11:59 PM[Tue]: Diablo (1996) – The original game, but played through as a Sorcerer at Level 1?

3:46 AM/12:46 AM: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door – News of the Switch remake has put this classic back in the spotlight. It’s still the best Paper Mario game, and one of the best damn JRPGs period, overloaded with humor but with a great story too. It demonstrated that the Mario universe has the power to tell actually interesting stories-but it may also have been the game that causes Nintendo to rein in Intelligent Systems’ use of the Mario property, as (I believe) it’s the last game with individualized Toads.

7:15 AM/4:15 AM: Ducktales Remastered – The final voice appearance of Alan Young, Wilbur from the long-ago talking horse sitcom Mr. Ed, as Scrooge McDuck before he passed away. It’s one of Wayforward’s technically excellent 2D platformers, so it’ll be interesting to see how they break it.

8:26 AM/5:26 AM: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade) – A 1 credit clear no less. I love seeing arcade games at GDQ, especially if they aren’t rhythm games, or as I like to think of them, Super Simon.

10:24 AM/7:24 AM: Super Mario Bros. 2 USA – I find it sad that NES games tend to be underrepresented at GDQ in this era, although I can certainly see why, as this run is scheduled to be just 12 minutes long.

11:06 AM/8:06 AM: Monkey Island 1 vs Monkey Island 2 – I don’t know what this means. Are they playing them both?

12:25 PM/9:25 AM: Metroid Dread – 100% NMG (“No Major Glitches”)

2:40 PM/11:40 AM: Pokemon Crystal Item Randomizer – Additionally, this is played co-op, meaning (I think) two players are playing, but when one finds an item the other immediately gets it too.

7:05 PM/4:05 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – This run is marked “MST.” To explain, that stands for Medallians/Stones/Trials. For an explanation of the explanation, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

9:35 PM/6:35 PM: Super Mario 64 – “16 Star Drum%” Oh those abbreviations. Whatever that means, they expect it to take 24 minutes.

10:06 PM/7:06 PM: TASbot presents Super Metroid – Past TASbot performances have reprogrammed games to present full motion video on a Gameboy and a completely alternate ending to Ocarina of Time, so whatever they’re doing this year is anyone’s guess.

Thursday, January 18th

2:11 AM/11:11 PM[Wed] – 7:25 AM/4:25 AM: Short games – I don’t know if this counts as “Awful Block” since Ninja Gaiden is in there, but they are running a number of lesser-seen games, including NES Beetlejuice, the Xbox 360 promotion Burger King tie-in Sneak King and Virtual Hydlide.

11:42 AM/8:42 AM: Kirby and the Amazing Mirror – That odd Kirby game that was functionally a Metroidvania and gave him Smash Bros. powers as one of his copy abilities. Also, Kirby has three other Kirbies wandering around as helpers, and you can call them in a cell phone. Kind of a failed experiment, but it’s still interesting!

12:19 PM/9:19 AM: Castlevania III – A solid NES game, and one that hasn’t been broken to pieces as it still takes 40 minutes to finish.

2:35 PM/11:35 PM: Super Mario Sunshine – 120 Shines. That means getting all 240 Blue Coins too. AGDQ had a cursed run of Sunshine where the runner suffered a Game Over, but because the play eschewed saving to save time, all progress was completely lost, and they had to start from scratch! Hopefully this one will go better.

8:37 PM/5:37 PM: Super Mario Maker 2 Glitch Showcase – Nintendo seems to be neglecting this game-it didn’t get a bookmark website like the first one did, and now Wonder’s out with nary a remark about SMM2. It feels like they’ll bin this one before long, so please enjoy these glitches while you can.

9:22 PM/6:22 PM: Halo: Combat Evolved – Co-op on Easy. I understand that this extremely niche game was nevertheless popular in some circles. The 3? 4? of you who know of this game will enjoy it I’m sure.

Friday, January 19th

9:17 AM/6:17 AM: Undertale, True Pacifist Race – It’s hard to believe this game’s already eight years old! When will we start seeing Deltarune chapters at GDQ?

3:22 PM/12:22 PM: Risk of Rain Returns – This game is very new but already has speedruns!

4:40PM/1:40 PM: Super Mario Bros. Wonder

10:34 PM/7:34 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – 100% No Major Glitches Relay

Saturday, January 20th

5:38 AM/2:38 AM: Star Fox 64 – 2k%, which means, in the style of speedrunners, a speedrun with a special requirement, here that the player finish a score of 2,000 or more. Back when I played Star Fox 64 a lot, my highest score ever I think was a bit over 1,700, and I worked hard for that score, so this requires some “skillz,” as they say.

8:46 AM/5:46 AM: Sonic Origins Plus – “Anniversary Mode” Relay

6:33 PM/3:33 PM: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Any%, so, expect an unwise confrontation with Ganon with only four hearts.

7:51 PM/4:51 PM: Baldur’s Gate 3 – Last year’s other megahit, this goes through all acts but is only scheduled for 35 minutes. A friend of mine has, over a week, started this game completely over from scratch three times without finishing, so it’s safe to assume he’s falling way behind the curve.

9:04 PM/6:04 PM: Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster – The last game of the show, with “Cutscene Remover.” Even without them, scheduled for 2 1/2 hours.

The Dreamcast Junkyard on Shenmue-likes

The Dreamcast Junkyard is an underrated blog, and when it’s not telling us about good old Dreamcast games, it’s telling us about games that are like good old Dreamcast games. While Shenmue never got past the second game, despite plans for an epic multi-game story, its spirit lives on in a multitude of other games, from various studios. The specific ingredients of a Shenmue-like, I would say, are a real-time lifesim with a large variety of sidequests. But that technically applies to farming games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, which are not quite the same thing.

Six are listed in this article, and they are the Yakuza series (of course), the Persona series, Bully, Mizzurna Falls, Lake, and The Good Life; I’ll leave it to the post to explain the whys of each. The Good Life, specifically was entirely off my radar, but it sounds like it might be worth looking into!

6 Games That Scratch the Shenmue Itch (Dreamcast Junkyard)